Dear Marsha,







In The New Yorker, Jessica Winter published a thorough and enthusiastic article about Ursula Parrott, “Becoming the Ex-Wife,” and McNally Editions’ hot-off-the-presses reprint of Ex-Wife, Parrott’s first novel, which you can now read for yourself: 

“As Marsha Gordon argues in her engaging new biography, ‘Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott’ (University of California Press), the novel ‘offers a strong case for the protections of marriage and the dangers of being an unattached woman.’ In Parrott’s view, women’s drive for equality in the post-Victorian age had ‘made their lives harder,’ Gordon writes, ‘and her stories dramatized the consequences of this unwanted bequest.’”





And in the New York Times, Alexandra Jacobs published a Critic’s Notebook article about Ursula, “She Wrote Frankly About Divorce, and Suffered the Consequences.”



My goal has always been to drive attention to Ursula Parrott’s long-forgotten contributions and to get people to read her writings again, so the publication of these articles in the New Yorker and New York Times feels like a significant victory for “operation Ursula awareness-raising”!



More news: my Ursula Parrott “Lost Ladies of Lit” Podcast is now available! I really admire what Amy Helmes and Kim Askew do with this podcast: documenting wonderful women writers who have been marginalized or forgotten. They have interviewed many of my favorite nonfiction authors about their recent books, including Hilary Hallett about Elinor Glyn and Joanna Scutts about Heterodoxy.



If it weren’t for people like Kim and Amy and the work they do, or for entities like the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities, who support writers like me, I would not have been able to research and spread the word about this important American cultural figure. Speaking of which, I really want to bring more of Parrott’s writings back in print and have ideas for both an edited collection and possible novel republications—anyone out there interested in publishing these? They are wonderful reads!





Thank you for reading this newsletter, which is my way of keeping you—and others you might forward this to who have an interest in these subjects—informed as I roll out this book that has been so many years in the making.  I also made an “Ursula Parrott in two minutes” video, which is available on my YouTube channel.



Big idea: if you are a teacher or professor, this is a great time to consider adopting Parrott’s novel for your fall classes!  More on that in a future newsletter, in which I will jump into the ring of Fitzgerald vs. Parrott.





Thank you for your support,

Marsha





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